Vettel: I don’t think we lost direction

Perhaps the Italian team can be excused of taking the eye of the ball in the aftermath of Sergio Marchionne's passing and the resultant senior management changes, one would imagine the impact this might have had may have caused the wobble.

But when speaking to journos at Suzuka, Vettel insists that this is not the case, “I don’t think we lost direction. We made progress with our cars, the steps that we planned, the steps have been coming.

“Now, you never know where you are in comparison to others. Maybe they have done smaller steps or bigger steps, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure, speaking to all our engineers, that we are where we would like to be or where we wanted to be. Of course you would like to be always further with more performance, but that’s the same for everyone.”

Five rounds to go and fifty points the gap to Lewis Hamilton is the reality the Ferrari driver faces. To start with he needs to win at Suzuka for the fifth time in his career to stay in the hunt while waiting to see if the hitherto bullet-proof Mercedes will hit a snag at some point between now and lights out in Yas Marina.

Despite the pressure, Vettel is sticking to his gameplan, “I don’t like the ‘now or never’ approach. I don’t think there’s much sense in that. I didn’t know it was five out of six, now I know, so the secret before just now has been not to count."

"No, I think you attack every weekend. Every weekend is different, the track is different, the circumstances are different, so I’m very happy to be here.

“I love this track, it’s my favourite track in the world, so I’d better enjoy it and not spoil it by starting to count the things that are against me and focus on the things that are working for me.”

Ferrari were notably off the boil in Russia and the back-to-back weekends have hardly afforded them time to find out where all those cavallinos went.

Vettel explained, “Within a week you can’t do too many things differently, so we hope that the track suits us a bit better and we have a better weekend than in Russia."

“I think we nevertheless managed to get and squeeze everything out of the car. I think in race pace we were hopefully a bit closer – so let’s see where we start off here,” added the German.